Sorting through the information flood for usable knowledge for our farm

Wednesday, October 06, 2010

As a minor-league TV host...

This was not encouraging. Re: the debacle that is the Tribune Co.

And management still is confident that the new thinking has Tribune on the right track. The company recently announced the creation of a new local news format in which there would be no on-air anchors and few live reports. The newscasts will rely on narration over a stream of clips, a Web-centric approach that has the added benefit of requiring fewer bodies to produce.

“The TV revolution is upon us — and the new Tribune Company is leading the resistance,” the announcement read. And judging from the job posting for “anti-establishment producer/editors,” the company has some very strong ideas about who those revolutionaries should be: “Don’t sell us on your solid newsroom experience. We don’t care. Or your exclusive, breaking news coverage. We’ll pass.”[More]

For those of us in the Chicago orbit, the debasement of institutions such as WGN and the Trib at the hands of foul-mouthed yahoos (read the whole article!) is deeply saddening. Progress is one thing, but vulgar arrogance as a method to accomplish it is not a sustainable (note the buzzword) pattern.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

John: I don't know about you, but my patience ran out long ago for merchants selling common items like shoes, aftermarket auto parts and the like who didn't want to invest in inventory but: "Offered to order it for you if you wanted it." By today, it's just so easy to order merchandise, usually cheaper than in your hometown, and see UPS truck pull into your driveway within 3 days. I see a parallel to this new Tribune model. I can get all kinds of machine-compiled news for free on sites like Google News.I can watch an infinite number of live or very recent video feeds of everything from a presidential speech to Lady GaGa's buns on U-tube. I'm not going to pay anything (nor watch the commercials) for canned TV news that was not compiled and researched by a human that does not live in nor understand nor care about my community. I would pay to see Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. I do pay to see John Phipps.

In my view of this enterprise, the newsmedia landscape has changed since it's inception.

In the pre-internet days, news from around-the-world was limited, and we relied on these "national" media outlets to keep us informed. I, like many others, were intrigued with what was going on in far off places. We had no other source.

As the first Anon said, with the internet, we have almost an excess infusion of world news. But guess what has happened? Our lives have become so busy, we do not know what is going on witht he neighbor down the street.

We have a daily paper in our town that has been around forever and reports on everything under the sun. About a year or so ago, another weekly paper started up that focuses just on what is going on in our immediate area. Last month I cancelled my subscription to the old one and now only take the weekly paper for the local news.

I think the local news angle is where we will see a lot of the smaller papers go, if they want to meet that niche.

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About Me

I am a sixth-generation farmer who hold a degree in Chemical Engineering, a minor in Economics, and served as a nuclear engineer from 1970-75.
Jan, Aaron and I farm 2100 acres near Chrisman, IL. Aaron joined our farm operation in 2008.
I have written humor and commentary for Farm Journal and Top Producer for 20 years. I was the host of US Farm Report from 2005 to 2014, and now serve as Commentator.
I speak often to farm and agribusiness groups on topics from risk analysis to professional development.

About Incoming

Incoming is a collection of current thoughts on the nature of the profession of farming from the perspective of a farmer/writer (see full bio here).

It will soon become obvious to readers I lean to the middle, specifically toward pragmatic libertarianism: preserving individual liberty and responsibility. Another strong influence is my education as an engineer. Now throw in 45 years as a husband, 41 as father, and 30 as a choir director. Not to mention a life of farming.

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